History of Dueling Civ3?

[rufwork]

I fired Civ3 back up on my Mac a while back, only to find out what's old news to everyone here -- 10.5 won't play the older version.

Which makes me wonder why there are two versions again. Seems I'm a little hazy on the history. Why didn't Aspyr get to use the old codebase to make the Complete version? Was the first codebase MacSoft's and Firaxis couldn't make them fork it over? Why wouldn't MacSoft get to make the Complete version? Was there any technical reason? Did Aspyr bid under MacSoft *and* start from scratch? Honestly, that seems like madness and bad business from one or the other company. Hasn't Brad Oliver done work for both companies?

In any event, to have two versions of essentially the same game seems insane. How did that happen? Anybody know?

Thanks. Sorry for the quick new thread, but this has been driving me crazy intermittently for quite a while.

 

[AlanH]

How many different code bases do you think have existed for many, many Mac software products during the transitions from OS 9 to OS X, and from PowerPC to Intel? Civ3 is certainly not unique in getting rewritten!

I doubt if you'll get a full and frank inside story of the history. However, here's my best guess at what happened ...

I believe MacSoft got their fingers burnt over the original port of Civ3, which went through a lot of code versions from Firaxis, resulting in lots of rework cycles paid for by MacSoft, but done by Westlake, their development contractor. They appear to have lost enthusiasm for Civ3 around the time that Destineer took them over. Prior to that they were the Mac development arm of Infogrames. They never officially released the last two products developed by Brad Oliver at Westlake - the editor and the v1.29 patch were only ever "liberated" here by Brad as unsupported beta versions.

When the Play the World and Conquests expansions came out MacSoft opted out of ongoing support for the Civ3 series, and we may hazard a guess that Destineer, their new owners, had decided they didn't want to suffer the same issues as before. By the time Civ4 came along, MacSoft's original license for the Civ3 Mac version had expired.

When 2KGames/Firaxis went looking for a Mac porting partner for Civ4, MacSoft presumably weren't returning their calls, and Westlake, who had done all MacSoft's development work on Civ3, had disbanded. Some of Westlake's key talent, such as Brad Oliver and Glenda Adams had moved to Aspyr, so it must have seemed obvious to offer the Civ4 port to Aspyr. My guess is that the negotiations over that deal resulted in a package deal to include a Civ3 Complete port as well. This would consolidate the Civ3/Civ4 range across the resurgent Mac market, giving both companies scope for extra returns from their development and marketing efforts. I am quite sure that Aspyr are *not* mad, and they would have done the necessary evaluations to determine the most cost effective way to bring Civ3 Complete to market.

I have no idea whether Aspyr would have tried to license the original Mac Civ3 code base from MacSoft. If they did, maybe MacSoft wanted too much for it. As the MacSoft/Westlake code had been through the wringer to adapt it to ever-changing releases from Firaxis, it may have become somewhat fragile. In any case, Mac development had moved on. The original Civ3 was developed in CodeWarrior to run on OS 9. By this time OS X was established; CodeWarrior was dead and Apple's Xcode development tools were mandatory; Apple's Intel CPU switchover was in train. So it is likely that the old Civ3 vanilla code base was no longer a viable starting point. Brad would, of course, have been in a strong position to make that call, having developed it. And, you can always do a better job of any software development the second time around.

So, for whatever reasons, the Aspyr version of Civ3 Complete has emerged as a better product than the old one was. It offers window mode, it's far faster, and it supports a more appropriate division of the user and application file structures in the OS X world (although that has brought its own challenges with respect to mods!). And most important, it is still being supported!

 

[rufwork]

Some of Westlake's key talent, such as Brad Oliver and Glenda Adams had moved to Aspyr, so it must have seemed obvious to offer the Civ4 port to Aspyr. My guess is that the negotiations over that deal resulted in a package deal to include a Civ3 Complete port as well.
...
I have no idea whether Aspyr would have tried to license the original Mac Civ3 code base from MacSoft. If they did, maybe MacSoft wanted too much for it.
...
And, you can always do a better job of any software development the second time around.

The Westlake connection is a good one; I hadn't made it. You lose the human half of your codebase's cyborg, the code's spaghetti enough from the quick patching, and you've got nothing. Aspyr has Oliver, and the angle on supporting the title..

What does Aspyr do? Sounds like, from your CodeWarrior talk, that Oliver et al wanted to move from Carbon to Cocoa, right? The move to Aspyr and the inability to reuse Macsoft's Carbon codebase gives you a chance to do a rewrite (when you grab Oliver, I guess it might even be beneficial to use a new flavor of C for IP arguments?), but it really leaves those gamers with Macsoft's version in the cold. Rather than releasing compatible expansions and continuing support for ye olde proverbial Mac gamer -- again, I realize there are reasons this would happen other than *cough* greed -- you create a new, artificial market, so to speak, with the C3C barrier to entry. Want support? As we see on these forums fairly commonly, you'll have to buy the game again. It pays for the Cocoa [re]port (if that's what happened) sure, but the development + market influences really didn't do Mac gamers any favors there, aside from creating an OS 9 version of Civ3.

(Okay, that's pretty glass half empty. You could argue OS 9 games largely got the boot (I'd still like to play Deep Space 9, eg), and that Classic died at 10.5 too, so I should stop critiquing. How common is it that Carbon games hit the fan at 10.5, I wonder. Bloodrayne, eg, runs, but it seems like I had to install and update on 10.4 and then move it over. Still, I hate to see Mac gamers who shell out their cash get asked to unfairly do it again to keep playing essentially the same game, and with Civ3 going to Aspyr, Macsoft's got almost zero incentive to be Good People and release updates.)

Did Oliver work on Civ3C @ Aspyr too? Would Macsoft have gotten the chance to support PTW, etc if they'd wanted? How were the expansions done on the PC again? Were they initially sold separately, requiring the original? That is, did Macsoft give up the opportunity to sell those expansions? Oliver sounds like he's working on PTW while writing the final [beta] Macsoft patch...

Thanks for the reply. This is an interesting example, imo, of the state of Mac gaming. You don't see this sort of thing, where two publishers recreate the same codebase, on Windows much, do you?

 

[AlanH]

I think Civ3 is still Carbon. Remember that the large majority of any ported game code remains unaltered from the original Windows code. Moving C++ to Obj-C and Cocoa isn't a simple move. And Carbon has not hit the fan yet - witness Adobe Photoshop. Carbon can't exploit 64 bits, but that isn't an issue for games.

Did Oliver work on Civ3C @ Aspyr too?

Sure. I'm pretty sure Brad did most of the actual coding at Aspyr. I doubt if he got anywhere near the PtW code while he was at Westlake.

As far as I'm concerned, Aspyr and Brad have done us a big favour. Civ3 was dead on the Mac. Aspyr have succeeded in breathing new life into it, whatever their motives were. If this hadn't happened Mac players would not be playing GOTMs on this site now, and they would not have any options for playing PBEM or SGs with Windows players, who have all moved on from vanilla Civ.

Still, I hate to see Mac gamers who shell out their cash get asked to unfairly do it again to keep playing essentially the same game

I don't understand your use of the term "fair" in this context. You bought a CD with Civ3 vanilla that was released seven or eight years ago. With patches, it ran for many years after it was released, and it still runs if you are prepared to run the penultimate major version of OS X. If MacSoft had released PtW and Conquests expansions it would not be "the same game", and they would have charged you for them in separate deals, just as Firaxis did for Windows versions of the expansions - probably totalling as much as Aspyr is now charging for an up to date rewrite of the whole caboodle.

 

[rufwork]

I don't understand your use of the term "fair" in this context.

Supported ended for Civ3 "vanilla" on the Mac well before it did on the PC. For me, fair would be to get as close to equal footing as the Windows release as possible. And then Civ3 has proven to have serious legs on the Mac -- the price remains at $45 new, $33 used vs. $20 new and $9.25 used or $5 on Steam for PC (used vanilla C3 is $29 vs. $0.99!!). The game has had a much longer shelf life on Mac than PC, but ironically the initial Mac version wasn't supported nearly as long as the PC's. Early Mac buyers have found themselves on the outside in terms of price twice, once for the typical Mac tax, which I'm not quite specifically lamenting here, and again for the Macsoft/Aspyr Civ 3 hot potato and early obsolescence. Or three times -- Civ3 remains one of the more popular games on the Mac, and early adopters [only] are unable to keeping playing on their screamin' new machines. Whoops. Downgrade time. :^) Wonder if SheepSaver and OS 9 would work...

So the situation is not exactly, if you get my meaning, "just as Firaxis did for Windows versions of the expansions". The price for Civ 3 on Mac isn't just horribly inflated, but also, perhaps "artificially inflated" isn't the right word... It's also been inflated in a way that can only happen when you're talking porting.

Edit: In brief, I don't think we could argue that it would have been better for whoever had the initial Civ to continue supporting it via add-on expansions and a common executable of some sort than what ended up happening, right? If what we have now is fair, having continuous support for all Civ 3 owner/players would have been more than fair, and better. I believe that because the game had to be ported, the possibility for MacSoft Civ 3 owners to hit a relatively early dead end was realized. /shrug You can also reasonably blame Apple, of course, as they do break bkwds compat in the OS much more quickly than Microsoft does. And you can argue that Aspyr's lack of support for OS 9 jips low end mac users and that Macsoft did a better job. ;^)

The question, I guess, and I'll stop now, is that Civ 3 was rewritten on the Mac afaict, and that this rewriting didn't happen on Windows... Did this re-port affect the Mac gamer negatively? My gut says yes, and the easiest symptom I can find is early support termination which may have influenced (??) the inability to play on 10.5. Actually, the easiest symptom is that Mac users couldn't buy expansions for Civ 3, but honestly I'm not sure Windows users could. They could for a while, right? /shrug

What the heck breaks MacSoft's Civ3 on 10.5? The world may never know. ;^) /edit

Don't worry. I'm not an Aspyr hater. Nor am I a MacSoft hater; I enjoy playing Civ3 on old hardware every so often, and I'm excited Aspyr seems to continue to have a winner with Civ3 to some degree. And as Glenda said once, the only company with the power to bring Mac gaming up to Windows is Microsoft, and nobody's holding their breath on that one. I simply find the weird wrangling that is Mac porting particularly interesting (like Aspyr holding how many copies of Quake III?), and Civ 3 is one of the most interesting tales (imo) of the bunch. I'm just curious.

And fwiw, here's the link I saw where Brad mentions PTW and Macsoft together. I'm betting you're right they hadn't started coding, but it looks like MacSoft considered making it. I wonder if Firaxis (what were they before Firaxis?) had any say in whether MacSoft had to keep working on supporting Civ3, and if they got to stop once Aspyr picked up C3C.

Thanks again for the replies and catching me up on some history!

 

[AlanH]

Supported ended for Civ3 "vanilla" on the Mac well before it did on the PC.

Only because Apple's move to Leopard plus Intel has broken it. If vanilla Civ3 for Windows broke under Vista running on an Atom, do you really think that Firaxis would have done a patch?

Edit: In brief, I don't think we could argue that it would have been better for whoever had the initial Civ to continue supporting it via add-on expansions and a common executable of some sort than what ended up happening, right?

I don't understand the point you're making. There was no common executable for Windows, either. PtW and Conquests are separately compiled executables just as they are on the Mac. They simply share data file sets with the base product. Conquests was even written under contract for Firaxis by another software house. I'm sure the executables share a lot of basic code, but then, so do the Mac and Windows products. As I said, porting doesn't involve rewriting the game, only adapting it to run in the alien CPU and operating system, and to compile under a different development tool-chain. You are making altogether too much of the fact that this was done twice, Chances are it would have had to be done twice anyway, regardless of which company held the rights.

And fwiw, here's the link I saw where Brad mentions PTW and Macsoft together. I'm betting you're right they hadn't started coding, but it looks like MacSoft considered making it.

Your ability to read fiction between the lines far exceeds mine. That link says zip about whether MacSoft and/or Brad were involved with PtW. I very much doubt if he had even seen the PtW code while at Westlake. But I don't see why it would have been relevant if they had been.

I wonder if Firaxis (what were they before Firaxis?)

Infogrames - the company that originally owned MacSoft.

 

[rufwork]

Chances are it would have had to be done twice anyway, regardless of which company held the rights.

Would be an interesting question for Brad and Glenda. I'll bet a nickel, as a [professional] programmer myself for eleven years, that the Windows expansions sure as heck didn't start from scratch. I know many write one to throw away, but I also know how to make a good shared lib (see Brad on Civ4 support after you announced he was headed for Apple) when I need it. Vive la BurgerLib, right?

Your ability to read fiction between the lines far exceeds mine.

No need to get snarky. I'm not attacking anyone. Just wondering how it all went down. Sorry I lost you along the way, and thanks for the replies.